Wednesday, November 23, 2005

MS Developer Exams Branching

Code Language Branching in Developer Exams

With Visual Studio 2005 Microsoft has taken a step ahead in Developer Certifications... Remember the days when similar topic exams had different numbers based on code language... for e.g. 70-305 and 70-315... That is going to change now... With new Code Language Branching Technology for Exam Deliveries we will have just one exam with an option to choose the code language at the time of exam delivery...

With Branching in place, developers will be asked to choose the code language of their choice (ofcourse from select set of options) before they begin the exam and all the code snippets within the exam will appear the code language selected. It will not be possible to change the language in the middle of the exam though!!

The advantage of this is that there will be only one exam number to remember... With .Net which code language you use should not matter right (ofcourse with some ifs and buts :-)) so it will not matter which code language you choose while you take the exam too...

Currently most of the new generation exams (MCTS & MCPD) will be available in VB.Net, C# as well as Managed C++ (Yes!! Managed C++ too)... Although Managed C++ might not be an option for exams where there are technology limitations... But overall pretty cool huh!!

Well all this doesn't sound pretty huge to developers right!!... Putting a few radio buttons in the beginning and showing some code based on the choice made, how big deal can it be... Believe me, I have been developer all my life appearance can be deceptive, it was definitely a big deal doing it technically...

Consider changing source code of 3rd party Windows based applications and then deploying it to more than one centers of all the cities, of all the countries in the world (which use IT enough)... Now consider that if you did not have the source code and you had to ask someone else to change it...And then on and on... Well that was not what we actually faced but I was kind of showing you the magnitude of affect such small things can have... Don't ask me what we did, but our team did a great job and you guys will now have branching available in developer exams...